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Showing posts from November, 2013

Book Review: Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (1992)

Executive Summary Every cyber security geek on the planet should embrace this book. It has everything that we like: Metaverse hacking, real-world swordplay, awesome weapons, and—to cap it all off—the loser hacker ends up with the girl. Stephenson is a cyber geek of the first order, and his personality is all over this story. His description of the “Metaverse” and the “avatars” that live in it, both terms he made famous in this book, are so prescient that anybody playing World of Warcraft or Second Life today would feel right at home. It is canon and written by an author who truly understands the hacker culture. And if that is not a good enough recommendation for you, Time Magazine included Snow Crash in a list of 100 novels everyone must read. You should have read this by now. Introduction Because I recently reviewed the classic cyber punk novel Neuromancer ,[1] I figured I would continue the trend and review another classic in the genre to see if it too still holds up.